


Choices

by Gwen77



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-04-12 00:09:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19120546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gwen77/pseuds/Gwen77
Summary: Canon drove me up the wall, so here is another attempt at a fix-it fic.





	Choices

He woke in the dark. He could taste dust and blood and his chest seemed to be full of a thousand sharp stones, ribs and heart and sternum all replaced by rubble. He couldn’t tell if his eyes were open. The blackness was absolute. The Red Keep, he remembered. It had come down on them. This weight must be the Red Keep, then, the remains of it. So he was dead, and death meant living one’s death forever. Or perhaps he was only dying. Cersei—he put out his hand then, feeling for her, and to his shock another hand met his, a warm living hand. Not hers. Calluses on the palm. He felt his heart jerk in his chest, raggedly. Hell. He was alive.

“Will he live?” Her voice was very far away, but unmistakeable. Brienne. Brienne’s hand was on his. Perhaps he was dead and the gods far kinder than he had ever let himself imagine.

“Hard to say.” Another voice, unknown. “We can—try.”

“Do,” she said and took her hand away. That hurt so much that he knew he was alive and the gods were the same bastards they ever were. He tried to make his mouth move, to form her name, but it wouldn’t. It was smashed somehow. The noise he made barely resembled a word.

“He’s awake,” the unknown voice said. “Ser Jaime? Can you hear?”

Another horrible effort at a word, another horrible noise. Trying to nod his head was even worse. 

“Jaime,” Brienne said and his chest seemed to cave in altogether. He had to open his eyes, to see her. He couldn’t open his eyes. 

“Take care of him,” he heard her say. And then footsteps and she was gone. He tried to make her name again and produced only a single dragging noise, a vowel sound. 

“Hush,” the man said. “Don’t try to speak. It’s a miracle that you’re alive.”

Laughter shook him at that, rattling his broken hollow of a chest. A miracle. That was one word for it.

*

The man in the room turned out to be the fat maester who had been at Winterfell, the Tarly. He was kind and talkative and from him Jaime gathered that the throne was yet again in the hands of someone he had tried to kill and that Tyrion was the fucking Hand of fucking Bran Stark and Bronn, of all men, was fucking Master of Coin. He still wondered, from time to time, if he had in fact died and this was the gods’ idea of a joke. 

“No joke,” Tyrion said. His voice was shaky and, even in the dark of his bandaged eyes, Jaime could hear that he had been weeping. For Jaime himself, undoubtedly, and for the dragon queen and perhaps a little even for Cersei. He remembered the days when Tyrion had worshipped Cersei, long long ago, his desperation for her to smile at him just once, to laugh even reluctantly at his jokes. He remembered Cersei’s implacable contempt. His memory overflowed then—her eyes, her voice, the corners of her mouth—and his own tears came, though they burned his raw eyes. Cersei was dead and he was alive. It was all wrong. It made him a true cripple, the way even the loss of his hand had not.

“Jaime,” Tyrion said. “Jaime, please. Don’t die. Not again, I can’t—”

“He won’t die,” Tarly said and Jaime wanted to kill him. Why couldn’t they just let him—

“Will I,” he said in his slurred new voice. “Am I blind?”

“Don’t know yet,” Tarly said in his infuriatingly cheery voice. “We need to let your eyes heal a bit.”

He wasn’t blind, it turned out. He wasn’t even lame. His broken bones healed, unbearably slowly—Tyrion’s face swam dizzily into view, and Tarly’s and Bronn’s and Bran Stark’s—and he could stand on his shaky wasted legs and walk and lift his arms and shave himself and stare at the ceiling like any other man. Of eighty. With one hand. Bran Stark—the king—came to see him unnervingly often, hands clasped in his lap, his gaze fixed and unwavering. And Brienne. Brienne never came again. He might have thought he’d dreamt her, except that Tyrion had told him, unasked, that she had not gone North, that she had agreed to serve as Commander of the Kingsguard at Sansa’s request. So she was here, a room or two away, and never coming near him. Why would she. How could he even imagine she would. He was too weak to stop himself, though. He imagined it continuously, through the six months it took for him to stand up again on trembling knees, and in all that time she never came.

*

From time to time, without much interest, he wondered what they meant to do with him. Execution was a possibility, of course, but he didn’t think Bran Stark was sadist enough to put him together again at such expense only for the sake of a more inventive death. The boy had no passions of that kind. Lord of Casterly Rock? He tried to imagine it, failed. Perhaps he was Stark’s gift to his Hand, Tyrion’s pet cripple. Tyrion was useful and his gratitude at having Jaime restored to him might perhaps make the effort of piecing him together worthwhile. Except the Stark boy somehow already had all Tyrion’s loyalty, so—

“I want you for my Kingsguard,” the king said and Jaime, who had taken all of six minutes to totter from his bed to his chair that morning, stared. If Bran Stark ever joked—

“I don’t joke,” Stark interrupted. “You’ll join the Kingsguard.” 

“I’m a cripple who tried to kill you,” Jaime said blankly. “Your grace,” he added, catching Tyrion’s eye. “Why—there must be more suitable men. Your grace.”

“No,” Stark said and said no more. 

Brienne, however, said plenty when the king brought his bright idea to her—he could hear the conversation down the corridor, her voice raised.

“He’s too weak!” she was saying and he felt himself flush like a boy of fifteen. It was only a fact. Too weak, and too treacherous, surely. “What good will he be?”

“I need him,” the king said in his flat voice. “Make him strong again.”

Silence. Jaime looked at the door, listening to her silence and then—his heart began to pound—her footsteps. The door opened and he looked away, catching only a dazzling gleam of gold and white. Brienne. She stood in the door for a time and then came in and shut it.

“Do you know what this is about?” she demanded. 

“No,” he said to the wall and then pulled himself together enough to look at her chin. “I don’t know what he wants with me. Least of all in the Kingsguard.”

“Can you fight?” 

That made him laugh. He let his gaze skate over her face, quickly. Blue eyes. A frown. Brienne, Brienne, Brienne, exactly as she had looked at Winterfell. Ser Brienne. Knight of the seven kingdoms, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. His commander now, he supposed.

“I can just about walk,” he said. “And stand. For a few minutes at a time. I can’t hold a sword.”

Her gaze flickered momentarily. Pity? Disappointment? She frowned more deeply still.

“Have you tried?”

“No,” he said and showed her his wasted arm and wrist. She looked them over impersonally and shook her head.

“We’ll try tomorrow,” she said. She hesitated, looking at him, and it took all his feeble strength to hold her gaze. She gave a curt nod farewell. “Ser Jaime.” 

And she was gone, in a swirl of cloak and gold. He found he was breathing as if he had been in a fight, as if she’d flung him to the floor and put her foot to his chest as he’d seen her do to men and monsters a hundred times before. He’d have to find a way to learn to meet her eyes. He’d be no use to her at all if he couldn’t.

*  
Brienne was merciless, and mercilessly patient. The first time Jaime had learned to fight, he’d been a natural—a golden lion, all grace and instinct—and all his teachers had had to do with him was praise. The second time had been Bronn, careless and brutal, who had simply battered him into the ground and taunted him into a rage to see what he would do. Brienne never praised and never taunted. All she said was _again_ and _get up_ and _more to the left_. And she didn’t batter him into the ground; she used just enough of her strength to overcome him every time, pushing him a little harder week by week. 

It was the best teaching he had ever had. His body had forgotten everything it used to know—drilling him was like training a green squire, for her—and she taught him everything all over again, things he had never even realised he used to do. How to breathe. How to stand. How to gauge and use an opponent’s strength. All the old instincts came back, honed and sharpened in his awareness. But he was still feeble. At first, his arms had been too weak for the broadsword and she had drilled him with wooden swords, ordering him to practice all sorts of exercises to build up his strength.

That part had been strange. To have Brienne’s eye run professionally over his body, to have her put her hand to the muscle of his arm and squeeze, curtly appraising, and to remember all the other ways she had once looked at him and touched him. He tried not to remember and he tried not to search her face for signs of remembering on her part, but he couldn’t always help it. She showed no sign at all, nothing but that brusque patience and practicality. He remembered that her face used to be terribly expressive, to his eye. Her throat had worked when she was moved. Her eyes used to widen and glimmer. And that one time—he swallowed the memory like glass. Her voice breaking on a plea. Her tears. All that was gone. She was grim, always, and calm, always, it seemed. Her eyes met his coolly, without any of the old embarrassment. He had killed that, he realised, when he had told her to hate him. Brienne couldn’t hate him but he had killed her desire for him and her respect for him. She saw him now only as another duty. 

“Get up,” she said, for the fifth time that day, and he tried to obey and found he couldn’t. His muscles had strengthened over the months of training but not enough to recover easily from Brienne at almost her full strength. His legs had a tremor and his arms were weak as paper. He could barely hold up his head. He tried again, gritting his teeth, and Brienne knelt beside him. “Wait.” She put her hand on his arm, pressing, gentle. Gentle. “Rest a minute.”

He looked at her then, he couldn’t help it. Her face was so close. She was looking at her own hand on his arm; he could hear her steady forceful breathing and see the faint golden down on her cheek, the shadows of her long lashes. A storm of wanting passed through him, left him shaken and ashamed. 

“What’s the point of this?” he blurted out. “I’m not—this is a waste of your time, my lady. You’d be better employed drilling the squires.” 

“Ser,” she said softly, her eyes still on her hand on his arm. “Not my lady.” Her gaze rose to his face. “ _You_ ought to remember that.” His voice stuck in his throat. She was. Brienne was smiling at him, that narrow quarter-smile of hers that barely touched the corner of her mouth. He couldn’t think how he had earned it. 

She took his arm in a firmer grip and hauled him to his feet, held him till he steadied and then let him go. 

“It’s not a waste of time,” she said in her normal firm voice. “You’ve improved. Two more months and you’ll be as good as any other man of the Kingsguard.”

He couldn’t speak, looking at her. He remembered how she had smiled when they had applauded her. How her eyes had sought and held his and the pride that had shone in them—pride in them both, in him too. And now she was being, in her pity for his weakened state, kind. 

“Enough for today,” she said. “Rest, Ser Jaime.”

“ _Brienne_ ,” he said, helplessly, and her hint of a smile vanished. She gave him a wary look. “Ser Brienne,” he corrected himself and saw the faint easing of strain about her eyes and mouth. “Do you really think I’ll be ready in two months?”

“Yes,” she said flatly and he believed her. Another two months and he would be—no golden lion, certainly, nothing remarkable as a fighter, but as good as any other man of the Kingsguard, fit to defend Bran Stark against the more pedestrian sort of threat. An ordinary soldier, in service to House Stark. _You’d be better off dead_ , Cersei’s voice said in his mind, but he ignored her. He ought to have died with her but he hadn’t, and Brienne was his commander now. She certainly would not give him permission to crawl off and die of wounded pride.

*

In fact, there were few real threats to the king in the first year of Jaime’s service in the new Kingsguard. It was a frail time of rebuilding, across the seven—six—kingdoms, and Brienne found far more use for his mind than his strength. She sent him with his squadron to escort families of smallfolk from their makeshift shelters to the new homes that were slowly coming up in the old town. She sent him to clear rubble, in places where the job was delicate and dangerous because of the underlying structures. No one seemed to recognise or resent him. A wooden hand no longer stood out in King’s Landing, after the dragon—the sight of a whole man, unblemished, was rarer. Even in the Kingsguard, where men recognised him, no one seemed to care. They were young men, with few memories of the time before the great wars, and they simply accepted him as another brother, treating him with the shade of deference due to an older man, a cripple, and a veteran of wars.

The relief was exquisite. In a way, it was as if his prayer to die had been granted. He was alive but his life now had little to do with being Jaime Lannister, despised and feared and looked at wherever he went. He still dreamt every night of Cersei, Cersei contemptuous and fearful and angry and tender, woke weeping from the dreams, but he felt at peace in the day, watching Brienne work, watching her glare at Bronn and persuade Tyrion and map the city and command her men. 

She worked absurdly hard, his new lady commander. From dawn to midnight, sometimes, it seemed, long after she had dismissed the men. Tyrion had given a good deal of the routine work of running the city itself to her and she did it with the ferocious zeal with which she did everything. Sewers. Hospitals. Quarrels in slums. When she sent for him to consult him on such matters, he wanted sometimes to tell her to just go to bed, to tell her the smallfolk could wait till morning for her to settle their endless affairs. He didn’t, of course. It wasn’t his place.

Then there was a wedding. A man of the Kingsguard, marrying a girl from Riverrun, apparently a childhood sweetheart. Men of the Kingsguard married now, apparently, like it was nothing. When he had been told—invited, with the rest of the men—his eyes had inadvertently found Brienne’s and she had given him a faint acknowledging nod before her attention turned to the groom. 

“Congratulations, Ser Arthur,” she said. “I am sure you will be happy.”

“Thank you, lord commander,” he said, looking rather overwhelmed. “I’d be—it’d be an honour if you could attend.”

“Thank you,” she said politely. “If I can, I will.”

She did come, for an hour, out of courtesy, still in full armour. She bowed to the bride and drank a single glass of wine and then left. Jaime had watched her drink, helplessly, lost in memory, and he had managed to catch her eye just as she was leaving, to receive another of her brief inscrutable nods.

“She’s like a—not a woman at all,” one of the men at the table was saying, drunkenly. Jaime felt his shoulders stiffen. “Did you hear what she did at the Battle of Winterfell? Killed more than a thousand wights, like it was nothing. Have you seen her fight?” 

A few eyes turned to Jaime, then, knowing he had been at Winterfell.

“I’ve seen her fight,” he said, when he saw they expected him to say something. An old memory revived, the first stirring of awe. Two quick deaths. He cleared his throat. “She’s good.”

There was a little stir of laughter at the understatement. They were proud of her, these men who barely knew her. Proud to serve under a legend; they all saw her as a legend, simple and magical and as far removed from the ordinary business of life, of men and women and marriage, as a dragon.

He found himself remembering—oh, he’d had far too much wine—what she had been like, in bed with him. Oddly fearful in some moments and bold in others. She had cupped his face and held him still to kiss him. She had refused to meet his eyes when he touched her gently. She had been gloriously responsive to teasing. The first morning, when she woke, she had looked at him with a terrible uncertainty that he had spent the next week kissing away. And she had wept when he had left her, defenceless. He remembered—his palms itched with remembering—the softness of her skin. Now she seemed to wear her armour at all times, even at weddings.

“The bedding!” the men were shouting. “The bedding!” The bride was laughing, pink. Jaime tried to smile but he couldn’t join in. He crept away instead and walked back to his rooms in the swaying yellow light, drunk. For a moment, he let himself fantasise that he would find her there, bare in his bed, waiting for him. Of course she wasn’t, but that was the first night he dreamed of Brienne instead of Cersei—Brienne in his arms, Brienne in tears, Brienne stern and remote with her sword to his throat—and he woke with a crushing pain at his chest that felt heavier than the weight of the Red Keep.

*

In the third year of Bran Stark's reign, there was more fighting to do. Scraps of rebellions flared up, in different corners of the Kingdoms—stray pirates who rebelled against House Greyjoy and against King's Landing, a fragmentary remnant of Bolton men, under a bastard pretender to Bolton blood, hoping to overthrow the Queen in the North and to assassinate her brother as a first step to retaking the North. 

Brienne stayed in King's Landing, to hunt down the would-be assassins, but she sent Jaime to assist the Greyjoy fleet against the pirates. When he came back, she had gone North, to Winterfell, and she had left him a note, a single sentence: _You have the command until my return_. And then a list of instructions, a pile of papers. He kept the note; he wanted to wear it, like a favor, but contented himself by keeping it in his desk to look at from time to time. She wrote to him four times in the next three months, but all were messages for the small council where he sat as her deputy, messages he had to hand to Tyrion and couldn’t keep. Tyrion had developed a particular way of looking at him when he was reading her reports, or talking about her, that made him anxious to avoid ever being alone with Tyrion after small council meetings. But of course Tyrion couldn’t be evaded, not for long. He simply followed Jaime to the White Sword Tower and sat looking at him as Jaime put himself behind her desk.

"What?" Jaime snapped, at last. 

"I have some concerns," Tyrion said and Jaime looked up, startled. He had thought Tyrion was here to be his brother, not the Hand of the King; the tone of Tyrion’s voice told him he was wrong. "About the Lord Commander."

Jaime felt his heart jump.

"What concerns?" he said evenly. Tyrion took a note from his pocket and handed it over, a yellowing scrap of paper headed with the sigil of the flayed man. Three names were on the list: Stark. Greyjoy. Tarth. Besides each, a small figure sketched in some detail—a woman, flayed.

"They want her dead," Tyrion said soberly. "Her personally. I didn't know that, before she went North." 

Jaime stared down at the note. The flayed man. The flayed woman. The name Tarth. His heartbeat was loud in his ears. There were men who wanted to kill Brienne—flay Brienne—personally. And she was in the North with only the survivors of the Stark bannermen to defend her, behind the ruined half-repaired walls of Winterfell. 

Tyrion made a small noise, low in his throat, something between a chuckle and a sigh.

"Look at you," he said. "She's hardly a lady in distress, Jaime. She can protect herself."

"I know that," Jaime said thickly. He did know it. He'd seen it. She could protect herself. An army of wights had swarmed her and she'd cut through them, again and again. His stomach dropped with the memory of seeing her vanish under that hideous swarm, of saving her, of her saving him, again and again. "May I go to Winterfell? To tell her—warn her?"

"You want to?” Tyrion said thoughtfully. “His Grace said you would.”

“Did he,” Jaime said and Tyrion eyed him from under his brows, utterly familiar.

“Mm,” he said. “For some reason. You’re to follow her to Winterfell, on the King’s orders.”

“To warn her,” Jaime said and Tyrion’s shoulders lifted in a shrug.

“Perhaps,” he said. “The King doesn’t always explain his orders. Who will you leave as deputy?”

“Podrick Payne,” Jaime said at once and Tyrion nodded.

“Sensible,” he said, and then his mouth twitched in a smile. “Pity you can’t take him with you. What a rare reunion that would be, at Winterfell.”

Jaime flushed, though he knew Tyrion wanted him to smile. He could never remember Winterfell—the firelight, her smile, the way she had glanced to Payne for reassurance before rising to her feet—without pain. It was horribly tender, that memory and all the others, sore with the pain of the last moment, of turning his back on her and riding away, of hearing her racking awful sobs echo in his ears as he rode.

“Tell her you love her,” Tyrion said abruptly, into the silence. “You can’t go on like this. Just tell her.”

There was a knot in his throat. He couldn’t answer, only shake his head and smile painfully. As if she didn’t know. A blind woman would have seen the way he looked at her and he knew what the way Brienne returned his looks meant, the distant kindness in her eyes. She would never again close that distance between them. She’d be a fool even to consider it and she was no fool now where he was concerned.

“Have it your own way,” Tyrion said dryly. “Oh. Another thing. Sam Tarly’s writing a history of the Kingsguard. Can you give him sight of the Book?”

The manipulative little shit, Jaime thought, later, when he had the book in his hands and it had opened obligingly to his own page and her writing. Tyrion never changed. He could never leave anything alone. If Tarly were writing a history of the Kingsguard, it would be at Tyrion’s instigation, to produce this moment. _Died protecting his Queen_. She had added an _almost_ , later, in a far shakier hand. Brienne, in her impossible generosity. He wanted to shake her. Why couldn’t she ever resent him for her own sake? She had resented him for the sake of the Starks, she had killed Stannis Baratheon for the sake of her Renly, she would methodically hunt down and destroy every enemy of Sansa Stark now living. But on her own account, when it came to the hateful bastard who had fucked her and left her without a last word of tenderness, she couldn’t manage even the petty revenge of silence. 

He knew what Tyrion wanted him to think. Tyrion didn’t know Brienne as he did. The absurd generosity of that last sentence— _his Queen_ , she had written, oh Brienne—was honour, not love. It was the jagged sloping _almost_ that she had added later that made his heart speed. Her hand had been trembling when she added that. Her solid calm had given way at some point, then, after she had seen him alive in Sam Tarly’s quarters. She had recovered it afterwards, of course, but. It must mean she was still there, somewhere, behind her new walls—the Brienne who had cupped his face and called him a good man in her trembling voice, the Brienne who had kissed his shoulder once, in the night, when she had thought he was asleep. He thought of the wary look she had given him, when she had opened her door to him at Winterfell, and felt his breath catch in his throat. Hope. The idiot feeling spreading through him now was hope. _A reunion at Winterfell_ , Tyrion had said with one of his sly glances, and Jaime wasn’t fool enough to believe it would happen—he certainly had no chance of getting her drunk again—but he was just fool enough to want it to. She might kill him for trying, he thought, but. He couldn’t not try.

*

He still hated the fucking North. Of course, Winterfell was the one place in the world where the people could survive siege after siege, White Walkers and dragons and all, and still reserve a corner in their hatred for Jaime Lannister, Kingslayer. The glares were quite unaltered. The Queen welcomed him coldly but didn’t immediately open a debate on whether he ought to keep his head, so that was one improvement on his last visit. Brienne frowned when she saw him, which was less of an improvement.

“What is it?” she demanded. “Why are you here?”

He tried to explain but somehow the scrap of yellowed paper with her name on it seemed less urgent and more like a flimsy excuse under her eyes and the eyes of the Queen. 

“Of course they want to kill us,” Brienne said blankly. “That isn’t news, Ser Jaime.”

“The King ordered me North,” Jaime said, in desperation, and she accepted that, at least, as they all accepted the King’s inexplicable orders. Sansa Stark was still looking at him with an odd quirk to the corner of her mouth, but at least she said nothing more about the reasons for his coming.

“Can you use him? In the siege?” she asked instead, looking to Brienne, and Brienne nodded. There was a long pause. “You still trust him.”

Jaime’s face went hot but Brienne didn’t even hesitate. 

“I do,” she said, just as she had once before, and Sansa nodded slowly and dismissed them.

“The siege,” he said, as he followed her down into the courtyard, trying for a normal voice. “Is this place ever _not_ under siege?”

“Flayed men, they call themselves,” Brienne said, striding ahead. “Brigands, mostly. All they want to do is loot and kill.”

“Oh.” They were near the courtyard gate now, a few feet from where. The air was freezing; Brienne was wearing a thick cloak of black fur over her gold and white. 

“You take the east flank,” she was saying. “I’ll take the west.”

“All right.”

His voice came out thick, wrong. She looked at him then, faint puzzlement in her brow.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

He couldn’t speak. She frowned at him and then seemed all at once to realise where they were. Her brow cleared. Something like a rueful smile showed in the corner of her mouth.

“Jaime,” she said, and the note of detached fondness in her voice was worse than if she had knocked him down. “Stop it.”

“Stop what?” His voice was still awful, hoarse through his shredded throat. Here it was, the place where she had touched him, properly, for the very last time.

Brienne looked at him for a long moment in silence. She was searching for words, he saw, and he forced himself to shut up, to strangle the idiot pleading that wanted to spill out of him, and to actually listen to her. She looked away from him, at the archway through which he had ridden to leave her, and then back to him. Her gaze was reflective, calm.

“You keep—you expect me to be angry with you,” she said. “Waiting for me to shout at you or—or cry.” Her mouth twisted a little, in something between a smile and a grimace. “Again. But I’m not—I do understand—I understood.”

“Brienne,” he said but she overrode him

“We don’t choose who we love,” she said, in her deep solemn voice. His heart seemed to stop. She smiled again, then, properly, rueful and resigned. “Or don’t love.”

He couldn’t speak. She touched his shoulder once, very briefly, a soldier’s pat. 

“Let it go. Your guilt isn’t serving anyone.”

“ _Brienne_ ,” he said but she was already turning away.

“Take the east flank,” she said again, more brusquely, and was gone. 

We don’t choose who we love. He watched her walk away, her straight back and golden head, the strength in her, and felt his throat close. Had he chosen her, any more than he had chosen Cersei? Of course he had. Over and over again, until he hadn’t. Was it his choice, then, this pain that choked him and made it hard to breathe or think? She was speaking to one of the men, her head a little bowed. We don’t choose who we—don’t love, she had said. She hadn’t blamed or hated him for leaving her, weeping in the courtyard; she hadn’t thought it surprising. He hadn’t, she thought, _chosen_ not to love her.

“Brienne says you’re to take the east flank,” the Queen said, beside him and he startled and then realised that his face was wet. Oh well. What the fuck did it matter. He could hardly increase her contempt for him. 

“Yes,” he said and cleared his throat. He ran his sleeve roughly over his eyes. “I’m to take the east flank. Your grace.”

Sansa Stark eyed him for a moment. 

“You love her,” she remarked and he nodded blindly. She turned her gaze to Brienne, now correcting the stance of a local lad from Winterfell, adjusting his grip on a sword. 

Brienne sensed their joint gaze and glanced across, met Sansa’s eyes questioningly. She read something in the Queen’s expression, unreadable though it was to Jaime; that much was obvious. Her face changed—for a moment, she looked wounded and uncertain, her gaze flickering from Sansa’s face to Jaime’s and back again. It was the way she had looked at him when he had offered her the knighthood, the first time, when she hadn’t believed he meant it. She gave Sansa a quick jerky nod of her head and turned back to the lad. 

“She deserves better,” the Queen said coolly. “I always thought so.”

“I know she does,” Jaime said. Brienne was conscious of his gaze now, as she hadn’t been before. Her ears were red.

“Leave her alone,” the Queen said with sudden sharpness. “At least until after the battle. Do you understand, Ser Jaime? That’s an order.”

“Yes, your grace,” he said. He didn’t care at all about her orders but Brienne did and she kept well clear of him until after the battle. When they’d cut down the last of the Flayed Men and burned the bodies, when Jaime was washing the blood and mud and smoke off his skin, though, she came and found him. In the baths. Fully armoured. But. In the baths.

“You can’t bathe in that,” he said breathlessly, eying her armour and watching her look at him. “It’s unsanitary.”

“Piss off,” she said absently. A long pause. She looked at the wall and the floor and then at him. “Why did you come? Here, I mean?”

“I missed you,” he said. “I was afraid for you. I couldn’t—I didn’t want you to be alone.”

Brienne looked frowningly at him, suspicious. He let himself look back at her as he always wanted to look at her—Brienne, Brienne, grimy now with battle, her armour blackened with smoke, and still Brienne—and her frown deepened. She looked truly uncertain, for the first time in all the years since he had come back.

“I told you,” she said. Her voice was husky and low. “You don’t have to be guilty.”

“I don’t feel guilty,” Jaime said. “You always—you think I’m a better man than I am. It’s not _guilt_ , Brienne. It’s.” His throat tightened. She moved a little closer, still wary. 

“What?” she said.

“I fucked it up,” he said bleakly. “You loved me. And now you don’t. And I—” He drew an agonised breath. “I still do.”

“Do what?” Brienne said, more suspicious than ever, and he wanted to glare at her and kiss her at the same time.

“Love you,” he grated out. “Obviously.” 

Brienne said nothing and he closed his eyes. The bath had grown lukewarm, unpleasant, and he felt hollowed-out and sad. It was done then. He’d said his piece and she’d said hers and that was all. 

There was a faint metallic clank. He opened his eyes, unbelieving, hardly daring to look. Brienne’s leg greave was on the floor. She was working on the other one, her mouth compressed and stern, her colour high. He cleared his throat.

“The water’s awful,” he said. “Filthy and getting colder. You probably don’t—want to come in.”

“Come out then,” she said and he did, shivering. She shrugged off her cloak.

“Here,” she said, not quite looking at him and he took it, trying to decide if he was allowed to kiss her. The cloak was warm and smelled of her, smoke and snow and steel. Then she looked at him and it didn’t matter if he was allowed—he had to. Her armour was cool against his bare skin but kissing her was warm and dizzying, ridiculous, like wine after years of plain water. Her hand was firm on his shoulder. She was kissing him back slowly, tentatively, as if she had forgotten how.

“Come on,” she said, when he broke the kiss, and led him to her bed, up the winding stair to her room where—of course—a private bath steamed in front of the fire. He was dizzy with amazement, watching her strip with the same soldierly briskness and clamber into the bath and hold out her hand to him. The bath was barely large enough for two. They were a tangle of limbs and arms, their faces very close. Then she was kissing him again, desperately now, and his hand was on her hip and her hands were in his hair. Everything was frantic and violent and almost silent. Brienne’s breath came in hard jerks, like sobs that weren’t sobs, and she put her hand over his mouth when he tried to speak.

They did eventually make it to the bed with the pile of furs. He couldn’t stop staring at the long pale naked line of her back. There was a bruise on her shoulder blade. She turned to face him and he leaned in to kiss her and saw a momentary flicker of something, a flinch, pass over her face.

“What is it?” he said and she shook her head.

“Nothing,” she said and kissed him. But there was still that hard tension in her body as he held her. She wouldn’t relax in his arms. Couldn’t.

“I’m sorry,” he said, muffled, into her throat and she shook her head.

“I don’t need an apology,” she said. The tension in her was like steel. “I’m fine.”

“Clearly,” Jaime said and wanted to bite his tongue at the fury that flashed in her face. “All right. You’re fine.”

She turned her face away, into his shoulder. He listened to her breathing quicken, turn raw and agonised. 

“I’m sorry,” he said again, as gently as he could. He felt the moment when her tears spilled hot against his shoulder. _I’m a hateful man_ , he thought and didn’t say. It was true, but it wasn’t what she needed to hear. “I love you. I won’t.” He swallowed. “If you’ll let me, I’ll never leave you again.”

Brienne turned and scrubbed her face impatiently in the sheets. She glared at him under her reddened lids.

“Don’t you _dare_ leave again,” she said and he nodded solemnly.

“I won’t,” he said. “I swear it.” He grinned suddenly, stupid with happiness. “Lord Commander.”

“Oh,” she said, and winced. “I forgot.”

“You forgot you were Lord Commander of the Kingsguard?” 

“I forgot you were under my command,” she said, frowning faintly. “It’s not. I can’t take one of my men as a lover. It isn’t right.”

“I thought they got rid of the old vows,” Jaime said. “You could.” His voice stuck. He couldn’t say the words lightly and they came out fervid and desperate. “You could take a husband, if you wanted.”

“I could,” she agreed cautiously and gave him a sidelong look.

“Would you?”

“It would depend,” she said. “On who it was. Not Bronn.” 

“Bronn?” he repeated blankly and her mouth widened into a sudden smile, dazzling, brilliant. 

“He did offer,” she said. “A few times.” Her smile faded a little. “He thought it was funny.”

“Fucking Bronn,” Jaime said and took a breath. She still hadn’t. She’d avoided his implicit question completely. He made himself exhale and she put her hands on his face, held him.

“Are you _sure_?” she demanded. “It’s not just—because we had, we made, we f—we did this?” 

“No,” he said, grinning a little at her difficulty settling on a formula for what they had done and then sobering to meet her own sober intensity. “I’m surer than I’ve ever been of anything. If you want to.”

“I want to,” she said at once and he exhaled. His head felt light. She was choosing him, again, despite everything. We don’t choose who we love. 

“I love you,” she said, as if she had read his mind, and he closed his eyes. It was like the disappearance of a weight he had carried for years, hearing her say it. He put out his good hand, blindly, and she took it in her firm grip and held it, held him. All he had to do now was hold on in return.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! This is kind of a valediction to this pairing for me—I thought I was all done with them but then couldn’t bear to leave them as canon had left them. I hope my version of a fix-it works for some of the others in the fandom as well.


End file.
